Guest Recital Series
Texas Christian University

Program Notes

Robert Xavier Rodríguez has been a mainstay of musical life in Texas and the Southwest for nearly thirty years. Based at the University of Texas at Dallas, he supplements his teaching activities with an active schedule as guest lecturer and conductor in other communities. He was educated at UT-Austin (bachelors and masters degrees in composition) and the University of Southern California, where he earned his doctorate in composition. His teachers included Hunter Johnson, Ingolf Dahl, Jacob Druckman, Bruno Maderna and Elliott Carter. Between 1969 and 1976 he worked intermittently with Nadia Boulanger in Fontainebleau and Paris. After a brief two-year stint teaching at USC, Rodríguez returned to Texas in 1975 and has been at UT-D since then. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, he has also been composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (1974), the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (1982-85), and in his native San Antonio, where he enjoyed a three-year residency with that city's orchestra (1996-1999).

Trio II on was composed in Fontainebleau during Rodríguez's years of study with Boulanger. The composer has graciously provided the following background information.“My larger Trio I (1971) was then in progress, and Boulanger suggested to me that, as part of the compositional process, I should set aside the first trio, quickly compose a second, smaller study, and then resume the longer process of completing the first. Trio I was subsequently awarded the international Prix de Composition Prince Pierre de Monaco. [In the smaller-scale Trio II], alternating and recurring tempos serve to delineate the major sections.”

The one-movement Trio II shows a serious side of Rodríguez's musical personality. Sighing figures dominate the musical fabric, and the atmosphere is concentrated and intense. A sonata form movement, the trio is at once atonal and lyrical, infusing its chromaticism with understated and refined expression. Rodríguez allots each of the three players moments of recitative-like focus, culminating in a brief cadenza for each. The musical material is shared among them, with the piano having the last word, but pianissimo. A scant five minutes long, Trio II packs a lot of content into a brief movement, and every note counts.

Imagine a violin sonata comprising only minuet/trios. Or a symphony that consisted of four variations movements. The likelihood is slim; one of the principles that governs multi-movement works from the Baroque suite through the present day is variety of form, as well as of tempo, meter, and tonality, where applicable. Why, then, did Dvorák choose to write a piano trio with six movements that were all dumkas (or more accurately dumky, the Czech plural)? To begin with, the concept was not without precedent in chamber music. No less a composer than Joseph Haydn chose to arrange his Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross for string quartet. Published as Haydn's Op.51, that work is made up of seven adagios, each lasting about ten minutes. Thus, Dvorák's six dumky are in good company. Second, and in all fairness to Dvorák, the dumka is by definition a varied form. Of Ukrainian origin, it became quite fashionable in Poland and Bohemia during the 19th century. It derives from the Slovak noun duma, which derives from verbs denoting thinking, pondering, even brooding. Dumky are narrative, with sections of lamentation and melancholy alternating with parts that are more lively. This type of movement crops up frequently in Dvorák's music.

The trio thus contains a full range of tempi and moods. The lament that opens may function as a kind of slow introduction, or as a refrain that recurs later in the movement. Each of his movements is in a different key (the sequence of tonalities is e-minor, c#-minor, A, d-minor, E-flat and c-minor), and each contains sufficient chromaticism to engage and challenge the most musical of ears. Four of the movements are divided into two distinct parts (binary form); the others share more in common with rondo or ternary form. Duration varies from about four minutes to nearly seven minutes for a movement, with the second and third movements (Poco adagio/Vivace and Andante/Vivace) clocking the greater length. Dvorák connects the first three movements with the designation attacca subito (indicating no pause between segments, thus) lending them a larger design in the overall scheme of the work.

Dvorák maintains an overall mood of thoughtfulness and introspection in each of his six movements, but varies them with sections that sometimes sound positively joyful, even reckless. He gives the cello a prominent role throughout, a fact possibly attributable to its first interpreter, Janus Wihan, for whom Dvorák also wrote his cello concerto. The last thing we should think of in this trio is a series of dirges, for there is considerable fire in this music. Rather, the Dumky trio shows us the complexity of the composer's personality. Dvorák's genius manifests itself equally in his innovative approach to the piano trio genre, and in the impressive variety he brings to his self-imposed formal restriction.

Rudolph Johann Joseph Rainer (1788-1831), Archduke of Austria, was the youngest son of Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany and his duchess Maria Ludovika. When Rudolph’s father became Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II in 1790, the family moved to the imperial seat of Vienna. Thus Archduke Rudolph's entire education took place in the heady cultural and intellectual environment that Vienna boasted at the end of the 18th century. All the Hapsburgs were musical. Rudolph's delicate health provided further direction toward the arts and the church, rather than the military career that might otherwise have been an appropriate pursuit for a younger royal son. As a cleric, Rudolph reached the rank of cardinal; he also became Archbishop of Olmütz in 1819. As a musician, he pursued composition and piano performance. He is best remembered for the important role he played in Beethoven's life.

Their acquaintance began in 1803, when the teenage Archduke switched music teachers from Anton Tayber to Beethoven. He continued to study composition, music theory and piano with the feisty composer for the better part of two decades. Their friendship was not without its strained moments, but seems to have been founded on genuine mutual devotion. Rudolph became one of Beethoven's most important patrons, and was responsible in 1809 for an annuity being awarded to Beethoven that greatly eased the composer's financial worries. Rudolph's musical gifts were modest. As a pianist, he could not measure up to Beethoven's most stellar pupils, Ferdinand Ries and Carl Czerny. However, Rudolph was blessed with impeccable taste and an uncanny ability to discern between the merely good and the superlative among Beethoven's new compositions. This connoisseurship earned him the dedications of a remarkable number of Beethoven's middle and late period masterpieces, including the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concerti, the “Les adieux" and "Hammerklavier" piano sonatas, the Missa Solemnis, Op.123, and the Grosse Fuge, Op.133. Rudolph's name, however, is associated most closely with the trio we hear this afternoon.

The “Archduke,” Beethoven's last piano trio, is superb chamber music on a par with the late string quartets. It is also enormous, with four full-scale movements and more than 1200 bars of music. We have in this piece the apotheosis of Beethoven's heroic stance, a summation of everything that he accomplished and endured during the stormy first decade of the 19th century. At the same time, its broad opening theme and almost transcendental slow movement variations seem to reflect a newfound peace and maturity in the composer, then in his early 40s.

The Trio was sketched in 1810 and written during a period of intense work in March 1811. It was the only major piece Beethoven completed that year. While each movement has its own special character, the first and third share a nobility and spirituality, whereas the second and fourth movements are decidedly lighter, more flirtatious, and perhaps with just a hint of a wink in the composer's eye. Beethoven's biographer Marion Scott notes the opening Allegro moderato’s "energy obtained from the fairly rapid note values and dignity from the slow pacing harmonies." After the Olympian, expansive phrases of this inaugural movement, the simple ascending scale from which Beethoven builds the Scherzo is refreshing. The contrasting middle trio section plays some clever and sophisticated games, including chromaticism, misplaced beats that throw our sense of 3/4 time off balance, and a subtle manipulation of individual instrumental lines that turns out to be a fugato.

Beethoven's variations constitute a long slow movement that takes a luxurious amount of time to express every detail. The score, especially the piano part, is extremely dense with notes, every one of which serves a purpose beyond the merely decorative. Throughout the entire Trio, the piano writing is on a level of difficulty equivalent to Beethoven's mature piano concertos. The slow movement is particularly challenging. Extremely long phrases in all three instruments seem to suspend the music in giant arches hovering in mid-air. An ingenious transition moves the elegant final variation from the slow movement key of D-major to the home tonality of B-flat, proceeding without pause to the finale. The great British musicologist Donald Francis Tovey observed:

“When the finale of the B-flat Trio shocks us with unseemly conviviality before the slow movement has finished dying away, Beethoven has no apologies to offer. The outrageous jocularity continues unabashed, until not only the proportions, but the actual mysterious quality, of the finale develop a sublimity of their own. [It] is a marvelous study in Bacchanalian indolence.” Beethoven's Allegro moderato carries us along with irrepressible gaiety that somehow preserves the inherent majesty of the work as a whole. In keeping with the superior quality of all those works he dedicated to his royal patron, the "Archduke" Trio reigns supreme: Beethoven's finest effort for piano and strings, and perhaps the greatest piano trio in the repertoire.

-- Laurie Shulman © 2003

10/10/03